[Portions in bold lettering are the
work of the Highlights editor and do not appear in the original
text.]

The temptation when
thinking about enlightenment is to come up with something defined
that you can imagine, such as a state or quality of being, and
then fixate on that ideal rather than doing the practices that
lead to freedom. It is absolutely guaranteed that anything you
can imagine or define as being enlightenment is a limited and
incorrect view, but these views are extremely tempting just the
same and generally continue to be very seductive even through the
middle stages of enlightenment. Every possible description of the
potential effects of realization is likely to feed into this
unfortunate tendency.

Thus, my distinct preference
when practicing is to assume that enlightenment is completely
impractical, produces no definable changes, and has nothing
whatsoever to do with the scopes of the other trainings. This
means that I take it as a working hypothesis that it will
not make me a better person in any way, create any
beneficial mental qualities, produce any states of happiness or
peace, and provide no additional clarity into any of the issues
surrounding how to live my ordinary life. I have experimented
with adopting other views and found that they always get in the
way of my insight practices.

A view so easily becomes
sacred, and thus the temptation is to not investigate the
sensations that make up thoughts about that view, but rather to
imitate the ideal expressed in the content of that view. This can
seem like practice in fundamental insight, but it is not. I
realize that I am not doing a good job of advertising
enlightenment here, particularly following my descriptions of the
Dark Night. Good point. My thesis is that those who must find it
will, regardless of how it is advertised. As to the rest, well,
what can be said? Am I doing a disservice by not selling
it like nearly everyone else does? I dont think
so. If you want grand advertisements for enlightenment, there is
a great stinking mountain of it there for you partake of, so I
hardly think that my bringing it down to earth is going to cause
some harmful deficiency of glitz in the great spiritual
marketplace.

Bill Hamilton had a lot of
great one-liners, but my favorite concerned insight practices and
their fruits, of which he said, Highly recommended,
cant tell you why. That is probably the
safest and most accurate advertisement for enlightenment that I
have ever heard. There was a famous old dead enlightened
guy (whose name ironically eludes me at the moment), who was
known to have said, I have gained absolutely nothing
through complete and unexcelled enlightenment. A friend of
mine thinks it was the Buddha, and it may have been. Regardless,
it is traditional to advertise enlightenment in the negative in
the Buddhist tradition and many others, either stating what it is
not or stating what is lost at each stage, but it is so very
tempting to imagine that freedom from suffering will
naturally translate in to a permanent state of mental happiness
or peace, and this can tempt one to try to mimic that idealized
state. That would be a concentration practice.

Having said all of that, the
fact is that the models of the stages of enlightenment are out
there and available. Even when they are not explicitly mentioned,
they have an obvious influence on how people describe
realization. Thus, I have decided to try to work with them so
that they might be used in ways that are helpful rather than
harmful. This is more difficult than it may initially sound.

There are days I
wish the words for awakening didnt exist, the
models had never exited, and that the whole process was largely
unknown to the ordinary person so that it would be less
mythologized and aggrandized, thus making conversations about it
much more normal and less reaction-producing. I wish we could
start over, strip away all the strange cultural and mythical
trappings, create simple, clear terms for things, and move on
with things.

There are other days when I
think that at least people know it might be possible, even if
most of what has been said about it is pretty fantasy-based. My
greatest dream is that the current generation of enlightened
teachers will go far out of their way to correct the descriptive
errors and false promises of the past and lay the groundwork for
perpetuation of these reforms despite the economic and social
pressures to do otherwise. One of the issues holding this back is
that unfortunately only a few have gone far enough to see how the
vast majority of the golden dreams of enlightenment do not hold
up to reality testing. Another is that putting ones self on
an artificial pedestal can be rewarding in many ways. One way or
another, the number of voices trying to bring things back
in line with what can actually be done is small in comparison to
the forces that want to make it into something grand and thus
largely unattainable.

Before I get too far into
the details, I should explain that the most essential
principle I wish to drive home is that THIS IS IT. Any
model that tries to drive a wedge between the specifics of what
is happening in your world right now and what awakening entails
needs to be considered with great skepticism. With the simple
exception of the fact of misperceiving the sensations occurring
now and coming up with a separate, continuous individual, nearly
all of the rest of the dreams are problematic to some degree.
This basic principle is essential to practice, as it focuses
things on the here and now, and also happens to be true. Ok, back
to the complexities

The mental models we use
when on the spiritual path can have a profound effect on our
journey and its outcome. Most spiritual practitioners have never
really done a hard-hitting look at their deepest beliefs about
what enlightenment means or what they imagine will be
different when they get enlightened. Many probably have
subconscious ideals that may have come from sources as diverse as
cartoons, TV shows (Kung Fu comes to mind), movies, legends,
60s gurus, popular music, popular magazines, and
other aspects of popular culture in general. More formal and
traditional sources include the ancient texts and traditions of
Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Sufism, Kabbala (however you spell
it), Christianity, Western Mystical Traditions (Alchemy,
Theosophy, Golden Dawn related traditions, etc.), the ancient
Greek mystery schools (including the fragmentary writings of
those like Heraclites), and the non-aligned or ambiguously
aligned teachers such as Kabir, Khalil Gibran, J. Krishnamurti,
and many others.

Modern fusion
traditions, such as the various new versions of Buddhism and
other traditions that are present in the West, also have a wide
range of explicit and implied ideals about awakening.
Plenty of people also seem to take their own inborn higher ideals
for themselves or others that have arisen from sources hard to
define and made these a part of their working if usually
poorly-defined model of enlightenment. There is also a strong
tradition in the West of believing that enlightenment involves
perfecting ourselves in some psychological sense, though this is
also prominent in certain Eastern and traditional models as well
in slightly different forms.

Just about all of these
sources contain some aspects that may at times be useful and
other aspects that at times may be useless or even send people in
the wrong direction. The number of contradictions that can be
found even within each specific tradition on the subject is much
larger than I think most people imagine. For instance, those who
attempt a systematic review of the dogmas of enlightenment within
the Pali Canon will find themselves tangled in a mass of widely
divergent doctrines, myths, stories and ideals, and this is only
one tradition.

Thus, to take on the subject
of the models of the stages of enlightenment is a daunting task,
but by breaking it down into simplified categories, some
discussion of this wide mass of dogma and half-truth is possible.
I will use both simple, broadly applicable models and also
discuss specific models that come from some of the traditions and
try to relate these to reality. In the end, relating them to
reality is essentially the practice, and that falls to you.

I consider this attempt to
be just one addition to an old tradition that attempts to reform
the dogma and bring it back in line with verifiable truths. That
said, each new culture, place, time and situation seems to need
to do this again and again, as the forces within us and society
that work to promote models that are out of touch with the truth
of things are powerful and perennial, with money, power, fame,
ideals of endless bliss and pleasure, and the enticing power of
the ideals of self-perfection being chief among them.

In that same vein, this
chapter is very much a situation in which I claim a very high
level of realization, write as if what I have achieved is
sufficient authority to write a chapter such as this one, and
then present it as if this is a definitive text on the subject,
sufficient to contradict 2,500 years of tradition and the
teachings and writings of countless previous and current pundits.
While it is hard from my current vantage point to not believe
this to be true, anyone with sense will read this chapter
with appropriate skepticism, and this, as I see it, is
one of the strengths of properly applied Buddhism and rational
thought in general. The Buddha was forever asking people to not
take his word at face value, but instead to do the experiment and
see if they come to the same conclusions. I recommend the same.
If you are able to achieve something beyond what I state is
possible, more power to you, and please let me know how you did
it! I would feel real regret if I thought that this work had
hindered anyone from achieving their full human potential, and am
always looking for practices and concepts that are
useful.

Here is a list of the basic
categories of models that I use, though most traditions contain a
mix of most or all of these. There are probably other aspects of
the dreams of enlightenment that I have failed to address, but
this list should cover most of the basic ones. I look at each of
these as representing some axis of development, and basically all
of them are good axes to work on regardless of what they have to
do with enlightenment. That said, from what I have already
written, it will not be hard to pick out my favorites:

1. Non-Duality Models: those models having to do
with eliminating or seeing through the sense that there is a
fundamentally separate or continuous center-point, agent,
watcher, doer, perceiver, subject, observer or similar entity.

2. Fundamental Perceptual Models: those that have to
do with directly perceiving fundamental aspects of things as they
are, including perceiving emptiness, luminosity, impermanence,
suffering, and other essential aspects of sensations regardless
of what those sensations are.

3. Specific Perceptual Models: those that involve
being able to perceive more and more, or all, of the specific
sensations that make up experience with greater and greater
clarity at most or all times, and usually involve perfected,
continuous, panoramic mindfulness or concentration at extremely
high speed.

4. Emotional Models: those that have to do with
perfecting or limiting the emotional range, usually involving
eliminating things like desire, greed, hatred, confusion,
delusion, and the like.

5. Action Models: those that have to do with
perfecting or limiting the things we can and cant do in the
ordinary sense, usually relating to always following some
specific code of morality or performing altruistic actions, or
that everything we say or do will be the exactly right thing to
have done in that situation.

6. Powers Models: those that have to do with gaining
in abilities, either ordinary or extraordinary (psychic powers).

7. Energetic Models: those that have to do with
having all the energy (Chi, Qi, Prana, etc.) flowing through all
the energy channels in the proper way, all the Chakras spinning
in the proper direction, perfecting our aura, etc.

8. Specific Knowledge Models: those that have to do
with gaining conceptual knowledge of facts and details about the
specifics of reality, as contrasted with the models that deal
with perceiving fundamental aspects of reality.

9. Psychological Models: those that have to do with
becoming psychologically perfected or eliminating psychological
issues and problems, i.e. having no stuff do deal
with, no neuroses, no mental illnesses, perfect personalities,
etc.

10. Thought Models: those that have to do with
either limiting what thoughts can be thought, enhancing what
thoughts can be thought, or involve stopping the process of
thinking entirely.

11. God Models: those that involve perceiving or
becoming one with God, or even becoming a God yourself.

12. Physical Models: those that involve having or
acquiring a perfected, hyper-healthy or excellent physical body,
such as having long earlobes, beautiful eyes, a yoga-butt, or
super-fast fists of steel.

13. Radiance Models: those that involve having a
presence that is remarkable in some way, such as being
charismatic or radiating love, wisdom or even light.

14. Karma Models: those that involve being free of
the laws of reality or causes that make bad things to happen to
people, and thus living a blessed, protected, lucky, or disaster
and illness-free life.

15. Perpetual Bliss Models: those models that say
that enlightenment involves a continuous state of happiness,
bliss or joy, the corollary of this being a state that is
perpetually free from suffering. Related to this are models that
involve a perpetual state of jhanic or meditative absorption.

16. Immortality Models: those that involve living
forever, usually in an amazing place (Heaven, Nirvana, Pure Land,
etc.) or in an enhanced state of ability (Angels, Bodhisattvas,
Sorcerers, etc.).

17. Transcendence Models: those models that state
that one will be free from or somehow above the travails of the
world while yet being in the world, and thus live in a state of
transcendence.

18. Extinction Models: those that involve getting
off of the Wheel of Suffering, the round of rebirths, etc. and
thus never being reborn again or even ceasing to be at the moment
of enlightenment, that is, the great Poof!

20. Unitive Models: that you will become one with
everything in some sense.

21. Social Models: that you will somehow be accepted
for what you may have attained and/or that you have attained
something when people think you have.

Like me, you have probably
run into most or all of these ideals of awakening in your
spiritual quest and probably within yourself at some point in
time, either consciously or unconsciously. Given all of these
high ideals, it is not surprising that we find the task of
awakening daunting if not preposterous. Imagine yourself
as the universally-accepted radiant immortal angel bodhisattva
bright-eyed yoga-butt-having all-loving one-with-the-universe
endlessly mindful perfectly healthy emotionally perfected
psychologically pure endlessly altruistic non-thinking
desire-free psychic-superhero star-child of light, and then
notice how this image may be in some contrast with your current
life. If you are anything like me, you may notice a bit
of a discrepancy!

Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha:
an unusually hardcore dharma book